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Every spring in in Harrowden, when the chimneys belch blacker than usual, they come... nothing is official, like. No fliers, no town notice. But folk know. They always know, when it is, it comes with a hush leading up to it that settles over Harrowden like damp fog.
Just as we think we've made it through winter’s grip... just as the days stretch long... then comes the Blackheart Friday Parade...
Some say it was rooted in the strikes, others claim it goes back to when the moors were worshipped and the bogs were sacred.
Ain’t like no parade you’d boast or clap for. Figures cloaked in rags rubbed black with mill ash, faces covered with masks stitched from sackcloth, burnt lace, cracked doll-heads. Lanterns made from bones and rusted old tin cans swing from chains. The gloamrats and other young’uns march ahead, wearing paper crowns too damp to hold shape. There’s no music as such, the soundtrack is these strange droning booming sound systems pulled on carts, singing industrial noise like frantic ghosts remembering the factories of old.
It’s a protest, some say. A warning, say others. But the older people reckon it’s an old pact kept barely alive. An appeasement for what sleeps down by Gallows Bog, for what happened... Either way, folk shutter early. The Velvet Toad closes up, pretending it never existed, the rich, landlords and mill owners nowhere to be found.
What sets most uneasy ain’t what walks, it's what floats. Look up, and there they are: the Varnlings. Massive, drifting’ shapes gliding through the sky like oily smears on the clouds, dripping thick black as if the sky itself were weeping soot. They make no sound, but their presence hangs like a held breath. No one knows if they follow the parade or if they are in fact leading it. But they always come, drifting like rot in the wind.
Some folk reckon they first showed when them from Frostmere drifted in, salt in their lungs and secrets in their eyes, but don't pay too much attention to that there’s always been a strange chill between Harrowden and Frostmere folk. A sense that they don’t quite belong, no matter how long they’ve been here.
And so it goes, every year. The Blackheart Friday Parade comes, a strange and twisted ritual woven into the very fabric of Harrowden’s dark heart. It’s something talked about, yet no one dares understand fully. Perhaps it’s better left as it is, a reminder of the town’s restless past, of old divisions and things better left unspoken.